Quick LInks

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

#TwitterSearch

Social networking sites are not just places to maintain relationships.
They are also valuable information sources. Previous posts (Online QuestionAsking, Asking v. Searching) have discussed how people find information using social
networks by asking questions. This post explores the other way people find
information using social media: by searching preexisting social media content. For example, if someone wanted to read a lot
of snarky comments about the use of CamelCase in hashtags, they might go to
Twitter and search for "#nowthatchersdead."

Despite the fact that people issue over a billion queries to Twitter
every day, we don’t actually know much about their behavior when they do so. Of
course, we didn’t used to know much about people’s behavior during web search
either. Much of what we take for granted about web search (e.g., that people
issue one or two word queries, don’t use advanced operators, and often search to
navigate to websites) was once surprising because our frame of reference was
library or legal search. For example, Jansen et al. observed in 1998 that many Excite
users misused the Boolean AND operator by not capitalizing it, when anyone
looking at the logs today would assume the lowercase “and” was intended to be used
as a conjunction. Of course, fifteen years ago 50,000 web queries seemed like a
large dataset to study – that represents just a few seconds of traffic on a
major search engine now!

So when we look at microblog search behavior, we see differences that make
sense in the context of Twitter but are somewhat surprising coming from web
search. These include:

The information needs we bring to Twitter are
very different than those we bring to web search. Twitter is used primarily to
find social content and events, while web search is used to find facts or
navigate to sites.

Twitter queries are used to monitor a topic,
while web queries are used to learn about a topic. Individuals on Twitter issue
exactly the same query over and over again just to see what is new. What’s
more, the topics that we monitor are all the same. Everyone is monitoring
#nowthatchersdead today, and tomorrow we will all monitor something new.

People can use specialized syntax when they
search. A strong lesson from web search is that nobody uses advanced search operators.
I know I rarely do, despite how intimately I work with search engines. But
hashtags and @references to people are common in the Twitter search logs as a
way to reference particular memes or people. Exposing the operators in the
content creation as well as the search interface helps users gain familiarity
with the specialized syntax.

While people use web search to return to
previously viewed content, Twitter search is almost never used to find
previously viewed tweets. This is probably because it is really hard to do.
Think of a tweet you saw yesterday and now try to find it. Hard, right? The
ability to express context and meta-data in our Twitter queries might help with
this.

By studying and understanding these differences, we can not only
improve people’s microblog search experience, but also identify opportunities
where lessons from microblog and web search can be combined to create a better overall
search experience.

3 comments:

Interesting. Joe Lamantia (of Oracle) and I recently did a study of Twitter, applying the model we developed here: http://isquared.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/a-taxonomy-of-enterprise-search-and-discovery/

Although we adopted a largely analytical rather than empirical approach, we came to similar conclusions: that 'Monitoring' was the single most common mode of usage, and that this mode also acted as a starting point for other repeating patterns or 'chains' of information seeking behaviour. We're currently completing the writeup on this, so looks like we came across your work at just the right time :)